A Military Dictator in Our Future?

The whole thing is wrong. How did we get into this mess? How can we ever get out?

That’s my political outlook in a nutshell. Not so long ago, I was comfortably nestled into the Republican Party, confident that Ronald Reagan would set the world right. Oh, how naive! I shouldn’t even be confessing this in public.

Well, here I am, much sadder but somewhat wiser, living under a government that kept expanding without limit during and after Reagan, while running up a national debt that would have made Jefferson — or for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt — ask whether he heard you right; and of course the moral and cultural garbage we live amidst seems to be getting irreversibly worse.

I can’t even call myself a conservative anymore. I don’t see much left to conserve. Most of today’s conservatives are to the left of yesterday’s liberals. They quote John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and they have plans to save Social Security and Medicare. They think a minor tax cut would cure the country’s ills.

It’s hard for me to get very interested in today’s political squabbles. I don’t have a dog in these fights; my dog died a long time ago. You know you’re politically homeless when you go to a John Birch Society dinner and you feel you’re surrounded by well-meaning liberals.

Am I a libertarian? Sort of. An anarchist? Anarchy might be great, if only it could be enforced.

I guess the label that suits me best is reactionary utopian. I want to go back to a better world that never quite existed.